PHP & Drupal

What Is .PHP?

Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that
was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages

For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted
by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document.
As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter
application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations
and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function
as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web
servers and as standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP
and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system
for at least 1% of all websites worldwide, ranging from small personal blogs to
large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. It
is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common
to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user
accounts within a role-based permission / privilege system, create and manage menus,
RSS-feeds, customize page layout, perform logging, and administer the system. As
installed, Drupal provides options to create a classic brochureware website, a single-
or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community website providing for user-generated
content.

Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added to
extend Drupal's core capabilities. This is done via installation of plug-in modules
(known as contrib modules) created and contributed to the project by open source
community members. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a content management
framework.[3] Drupal is also described as a web application framework, as it meets
the generally accepted feature requirements for such frameworks.

Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no
programming skills are required for basic website installation and administration.

Benefits of Drupal

All Content Management Systems (CMS) have forum and blog capabilities. They often
have myriads of different modules that you can use to extend the system capabilities.
So what unique features make Drupal so very special?

Drupal has vibrant and vivid community like no other CMS system. This is a point
that makes Drupal very concurrent on the Content Management System’s market.

Drupal also has some unique features that make it very different and much more powerful
then the most of other comparing software products (like open source solutions Plone,
PostNuke, or PHPNuke, or commercial products like Microsoft SharePoint).

Some of those features are:

Drupal is flexible and easy to extend

With Drupal, building an impressive website from scratch is simple and straight-forward.
It requires less programming than the other CMS's. More than this, it is easier
to add new features and even reshape Drupal website from a simple presentation site
to a web application. You do not need to implement everything again from the scratch
just to change something simple – you just make the change.

Drupal is reliable, efficient and robust

Drupal is very well known for its meticulously crafted and well-designed code.
The design structure empowers developers to write a code that uses the system resources
wisely. This means the speed issues and concurrence problems are not likely to come
into consideration in everyday work. Even more, patches or updates to a site can
be done in a straight-forward manner, and updating existing Drupal system that follows
a simple set of general rules usually take no more then one day to implement.

Secret Weapon of Drupal No. 1: Security

Most of the people do not think that security is something that they should
be bothered with. Unfortunatelly, they are wrong. There are people around this world
that use their time and energy to attack web sites, and the consequences for you
could range from loss of business to legal liability.

Secret Weapon of Drupal No. 2: Taxonomy

Modern organizational requirements moved their focus from simply managing
data, to making content easy to find and retrieve. With increasing amount of information
that are “somewhere” in the system, the problem of retrieving it is becoming crucial.
The Taxonomy module is Drupal’s answer to this challenge.

Secret Weapon of Drupal No. 3: CCK & Views

Content Construction Kit is one of the modules for Drupal.
It allows you to define custom fields in your content types. For instance, you want
to make a collection of famous quotations, and you want to track the author, the
quotation and the source of that quotation. And Views can help you to create different
lists of quotations: you can sort them alphabetically, or display only quotations
of Winston Churchill etc.More About the
Power of CCK & Views ...

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